Curtis Pokrant
Curtis Pokrant is a product, operations, data, analytics, and technology professional whose career has crossed financial services, environmental science, business, information technology, and artificial intelligence.
His professional path began in financial services, including banking operations and credit. After earning a BSc in Biology with a major in Marine Biology and Oceanography from the University of British Columbia, he worked as an environmental scientist and consultant. His work included fisheries and aquatic habitat, water and infrastructure projects, environmental remediation, industrial and natural-resource projects, and engagements involving government agencies, municipalities, engineering organizations, and international partners.
Beginning in the late 1990s, Curtis made a natural transition from environmental science into technology. While working with environmental management software, he found that improving fieldwork, data management, reporting, and related work processes required getting “under the hood” of the systems being used. He began learning database and software development to make the work easier, more efficient, and better organized, and discovered that technology came naturally to him.
That experience led progressively to work in software and database development, business analysis, data and analytics, business intelligence, product ownership, process improvement, and technology consulting. This problem-driven approach has remained a recurring theme throughout his career: learning complex organizations and problem domains quickly, understanding how people, processes, data, and technology interact, and using that understanding to develop practical systems and tools that improve how organizations operate and make decisions.
His work has crossed enterprise, government, startup, industrial, financial, telecommunications, transportation, energy, water, and technology environments. He has developed analytics, operational, and technology capabilities for organizations including HSBC Canada, New Zealand Trade and Enterprise, TELUS, APM Terminals, Canadian federal, provincial, and municipal governments, AutoFi, and Saudi Arabia's NEOM.
Curtis brings an international perspective to this work. He has lived and worked for extended periods in Canada, the United States, New Zealand, the Netherlands, and Saudi Arabia, and has worked directly with teams and stakeholders distributed across many additional countries. He has traveled through more than 40 countries across North and South America, Europe, Northeast and Southeast Asia, the Middle East, New Zealand, and Australia. These experiences have given him sustained exposure to different cultures, institutions, industries, infrastructure systems, and approaches to technology and economic development.
More recently, Curtis has focused, through his consultancy 009co, on delivering services and developing projects that use artificial intelligence to augment and optimize traditional business, data, analytics, and software capabilities. This includes AI-enabled web and mobile applications, data products, analytics and visualization systems, LLM applications, retrieval-augmented generation systems, APIs, databases, and supporting cloud infrastructure.
His projects have included fitness and health analytics, AI voice agents, LLM-enabled software development, LLM-mediated entertainment, and AI-enabled process improvement and automation.
Curtis brings to our Lifeboat Foundation a combination of experience in biological and environmental science, business and organizational systems, information and data systems, emerging technology, and artificial intelligence.
As a longtime subscriber to the Lifeboat Foundation, he is particularly interested in how increasingly capable technologies move from research into real-world organizations and societies; how they can be applied to difficult problems; and how their benefits, limitations, risks, and unintended consequences can be better understood and managed. He also helps improve our Lifeboat Foundation newsletter.
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